Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Understanding the quality of the customer experience associated with the services that you provide is a critical success factor for organisations supplying communication based services such as VoIP and Video, be they mobile or fixed.
The ability to identify when a customer is experiencing poor call quality for example, and being able to identify the cause remotely and rapidly lies at the heart of the good service support and Customer Experience Management (CEM) that is a critical component of effective customer retention.
Traditionally a single specialist monitoring solution would fill the need to monitor a service, identify issues and generate appropriate alerts.
However today's emerging services offer unified communications on advanced converged technology platforms that run ever more sophisticated applications that process Voice Data and Video.
This makes it harder to identify which element or elements in an end to end service are causing an issue. The process requires knowledge of Voice, Video and Data technologies, of your own service network and often knowledge of the customer's network and devices that may impact your service but which may not be supplied by you.
Utilising our CEP technology we are able to gather information from any and all points from the core network of a service provider (e.g the IMS network of a Telco) through to individual devices that sit on a custmer's own network and the mobile devices that they operate.
Correlating information about an event, in near real time, across all the devices associated with that event allows service providers to rapidly identify the nature of service issues as they appear and as well as allowing for Quality of Experience issues to be detected, often before they are regarded as issues by customers.
Unless a service provider is able to understand what is going on with all the technology that impacts how a customer experiences the service being offered (the customer's Quality of Experience or QoE), they will not be able to effectively address all of the problems that are likely to occur.
In our CEM Solutions area we have a collected a family of Spokes that together provide the most comprehensive view of a customer’s Quality of Experience.
Our CEM Spokes allow us to:
- Monitor Voice and Video call quality on the actual devices used by the customer - fixed phones, soft phones and mobile phones.
- Utilise what is recognised in the communications industry as the most accurate algorithm to calculate Mean Opinion Score (MOS), to give you the best possible understanding of the quality of what a customer actually experienced on the call.
- Monitor the quality of call communications when using unified communications applications such as Microsoft’s Lync.
- Monitor SIP Signalling and Registration for calls
- Monitor every element of a communications IMS network.
- Monitor Access Devices for call quality as well as QoS and Bandwidth Utilisation by application type.
- Monitor any type of application server that is concerned with supplying call related services, providing information about capacity, performance, CPU utilisation by application, which applications are running at any point in time, security etc.
- Offer either passive or active monitoring.
- Scale to any size of organisation/customer base.
- Have user defined alerts to identify any condition across one or more Spokes.
- Implement a fully featured solution without the need for any specialist hardware.
- Manage Alerts efficiently, supporting Customer Service team to focus on the main issues that need to be addressed without being swamped by detail (one of our Spokes is reducing 1.8 million hardware alerts that are generated from 25,000 devices on a Tier 1 Telco’s Optical WAN each day down to an average of 280 per day that require immediate attention).
- Map appropriate knowledge of hardware and issue resolution to alerts that are triggered by incoming data and making this knowledge easily available, in context, to enable customer services teams to resolve issues more efficiently and without the need for as many experts (hence at a reduced cost).
- Identify whether a quality issue is being caused on the Service Provider’s IMS, at the customer Access Device, in the customer’s network or on a specific end user device.